CD version. Of Mist And Melting is the second album guitarist Bill Connors made as a leader for ECM, a quartet session recorded in Oslo in December 1977 and released in 1978. After years of electric playing in fusion settings, Connors stayed with the nylon-string classical guitar throughout. He wrote six pieces for a band of rare weight, and the record holds chamber-music restraint and real rhythmic drive in the same hand.
Beside him are Jan Garbarek on tenor and soprano saxophones, Gary Peacock on bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums, the bass and drums pairing that would later anchor Keith Jarrett's trio. The session took place at Talent Studio with engineer Jan Erik Kongshaug, and Manfred Eicher produced. Listening again in 2025, Connors told ECM he had forgotten how much time he had given to this type of guitar. "Even though it wasn't what Manfred expected, it became exactly the album that we both wanted it to be," he said.
The opener, Melting, runs over eleven minutes at a brisk tempo. DeJohnette's cymbals push forward, Peacock keeps the ground, Connors lets his arpeggios ripple, and Garbarek takes a long tenor solo of carefully shaped accents. Connors tends to phrase well behind the beat, which gives his cool, linear lines a peculiar tension against the drummer's rolling time. Garbarek moves to soprano on Face In The Water and Unending, the quieter and more floating pieces, while Aubade and Café Vue bring back heat and a firmer groove. The leader often steps aside to accompany, adding counterpoint and harmony rather than filling space.
Billboard picked it among its top albums in July 1978, hearing "a subtle tour de force which will have other guitarists envious." Fifteen years later, Michael Tucker wrote in Jazz Journal that "rarely have elements of 'hot' and 'cool' jazz combined so strikingly", and singled out the blend of poetic contemplation and rhythmic vitality. The American magazine Cadence gave much of the credit to Peacock and DeJohnette at the time. For Tyran Grillo of ECM Reviews, the music charts "an ethereal sound that could only come from those gathered."
This CD (ECM 1120) belongs to ECM's Touchstones series, which since 2008 has brought back catalogue albums in cardboard fold-out sleeves; this edition was issued in 2019, the label's 50th anniversary year. The album was first released in 1978.
